Saving power, saving money with a green energy audit: cut printer costs and create power plans

Cold mornings and the clocks going back are going to put up heating and lighting bills for businesses as winter draws in, but increasingly IT is putting up the electricity bill too. Power prices have increased significantly this year and it’s not yet clear whether they have peaked. Offer customers a power audit that covers printing, servers, desktop PCs, storage and peripherals or include it when you’re planning a new deployment to sweeten the deal — and try it out in your own office to find out how much you can save by managing IT power.

Selling the first server

A server can make life easier for a small business customer and for you – but how do you convince them of that?

Server installations go wrong for any number of reasons, especially when it’s the first time the business has had a server, and for the strangest reasons. The server was built to specification. The engineer was on time and eager to start. The problem? The customer didn’t like the colour.

Exchange 2007 safe list aggregation

You can give Exchange 2007 a little spam-fighting help by enlisting all the copies of Outlook on your client’s network.

The Case of the Headless Corpses, Part 1

Three dead bodies, a locked room and a piece of mouse fluff – all in a day’s work for Dirtection Inc.

Using SharePoint for document management for the small office

Project management, version control, group calendars, no more duplicates… SharePoint offers the small business a lot more than fancy file sharing and often it’s free. Julian Jordan from London based  IT support consultancy Network Fish shows them how to get the most from it.

Using vCenter Converter in standalone mode

Taking physical machines and making them virtual is a complex task. That’s why you’ll need tools like VMware’s vCenter Converter to handle the conversion.

Dirtection Inc: episode 7

In which the Secret Service gets to grips with bonkers boffins and hallucinogenic horseflies.

How to get paid on time

Get your payment terms straight from the start and follow up on invoices professionally to deal with problem payers

Business Intelligence for Small Businesses with SQL Server

In these times of economic uncertainty, it is vital for your customers to understand how their business is performing. Are they losing customers? If so which ones, and are they gaining others? What do the new customers buy?

SQL Server: diagnosing and fixing performance issues

Many SMEs have applications that run on SQL Server. In the more recent versions, SQL Server 2005 and 2008 is largely self tuning so it may well run for months unattended. However, performance issues can still raise their ugly head.